Archive for the On Domestic Terrorism Category

New Yorkers Running For Their Lives on 9/11

Are the Leakers Endangering National Security?

As I listen to the media chatterboxes scream bloody murder over revelations that the National Security Agency has been monitoring the phone calls of US citizens in an attempt to foil terrorist plots, I am amazed at the combination of naiveté and self-importance exhibited by many of the commentators. To listen to them talk about their fears that the government may be spying on them one is forced to question the extent to which these people have a grasp on reality.

I have some questions for them: If you are not engaged in a criminal enterprise or a terrorist plot what are you worried about? And if you are worried about someone listening in on an embarrassing conversation, why don’t you just stop whacking off on the phone or dangling your weenie in cyberspace like former Congressman Weiner? And do you really believe that your personal privacy should be given a higher priority by our government than protecting the nation from a devastating terrorist attack? Do you believe that the Obama Administration is using the effort to defend the American people against terrorism as a smoke screen to disguise his real purpose, which is to spy on the American people and create files on everybody because he is a tyrant that wants to enslave us all?

If you believe these things you are a paranoid ignoramus, or a self- righteous libertarian, which are dangerous personality disorders that can lead you to do some really crazy things. Like expose classified documents and other government secrets which are lawfully held and that you have sworn not to disclose as a condition of accepting employment under the threat of severe legal sanction should you violate this agreement. This is what Edward Snowden agreed to of his own free will when he applied for a Top Secret security clearance and took a job working for the Central Intelligence Agency, and later as an independent contractor providing computer related services.

Predictably conspiracy theorists on the left and right, who view our government as an oppressive apparatus out to reduce us all into some kind of new age slaves – despite the fact that we voted for them and can easily remove them with our votes – have declared Snowden and his ilk to be heroes. If we listen to the conspiracy mongers in the press and elsewhere one would think we were living in a police state, where a dissenting opinion will land you in a dungeon somewhere or in front of a firing squad – since that’s what happens in a real police state. It is all absurd!

However people who believe this hysterical Tommy Rot and applaud Snowden for breaking his confidentiality agreement also view him as a champion of the American people in their struggle to free themselves from an oppressive government. But I agree with the lawyer/journalist/legal scholar Jeffry Toobin who observes: “For this, some, including my colleague John Cassidy, are hailing him as a hero and a whistle-blower.He is neither. He is, rather, a grandiose narcissist who deserves to be in prison.” This is also a fitting description of and prescription for Julian Assange of Wikileaks fame and his partner in crime Private Bradley Manning.

Listening to young progressive broadcast journalists like Chris Hayes and others on MSNBC – the liberal/left counterstatement to that burlesque on journalism FOX News – who are all over this story as if they think it is a new Watergate, we see how far afield some of them have gone. Chris Hayes pronounced with great pomposity that he never gave Facebook and Google permission to give the government access to his information, and conclude that these social media corporations “are in trouble.”

It is hard to imagine how anyone could be more clueless. If he thinks these companies are going to suffer any substantial loss of business over this he is thoroughly deluded. Most Americans think thwarting terrorists is more important than the concerns that exercise him. And they don’t care if the government has to look at their phone and internet records to do it; especially since they feel they have nothing to hide. I think the response of Lawrence O’Donnell after quietly listening to Chris Hayes’ passionate fulminations on this question is typical of most Americans: “I have heard nothing among the things you point out that scares me,” he calmly pronounced. To which I say “ditto!”

Furthermore, the press doesn’t rank that high in the opinion of average Americans – which is a tragedy because we need a strong independent press – so these Prima Donnas who can’t resist preening before the cameras had better watch their step! They could be engaging in self-immolation. Especially if people get the impression that they are endangering national security by publishing classified intelligence documents. For instance there are claims from the intelligence community that this type of electronic surveillance has foiled terrorist plots in 20 different countries as well as the USA.

When compared to this record, concerns from average citizens about somebody in the government snooping on their lives sounds trite, if not ridiculous, since many of these peopled don’t even find their lives interesting themselves; let alone some government intelligence official trying to uncover a terrorist plot. As I wrote in “Barack Obama and the Global Jihad, posted on December 16, 2011, “The measures President Obama is taking to wage war against the Jihadists is neither unprecedented nor unconstitutional.”

What Americans who are concerned with protecting civil liberties for the majority of law abiding citizens should really be worried about is what will happen to our democracy if the Jihadists should succeed in detonating a dirty bomb or nuclear weapon in a heavily populated American metropolis. Should this ever happen, we will lose all of our civil liberties with popular consent! People will be so frightened by the horror of it all they will agree to anything if they it will make them safer.

The three times Pulitzer Prize winning foreign affairs columnist for the New York Times, Thomas L. Freedman echoes my sentiments exactly in a June 12, 2013 column titled Blowing a Whistle. “Yes, I worry about potential government abuse of privacy from a program designed to prevent another 9/11 – abuse that, so far, does not appear to have happened. But I worry even more about another 9/11…not because I don’t care about civil liberties, but because…I believe that if there is one more 9/11 – or worse, an attack involving nuclear material – it could lead to the end of the open society as we know it. If there is another 9/11 I fear that 99% of Americans would tell their members of Congress: ‘Do whatever you need to, privacy be damned, just make sure this does not happen again.”

They Jihadist are at work recruiting soldiers for Al Islam 24/7

To join the fight against the “Great Satan”

And they have an unlimited number of fanatics to recruit from!

And we have got to keep themand US associates under Surveillance

Those Libertarians and other anti-government hysterics who argue that the NSA survelliance programs are unconstitutional because they violate the privacy rights guaranteed under the 4th Amendment should first of all read the text, and then they should bear in mind that the Constitution “means” whatever the Supreme Court says it means at any given time.

The history of constitutional law leaves no doubt about that assertion. We have but to consider the Court’s decisions in Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896, and Brown V. the Board of Education in 1954 to find irrefutable evidence for this claim. Hence when the text of the 4th Amendment prohibits “unreasonable” search and seizures they purposely left room for interpretation depending upon the conditions that prevail at the time. And I have no doubt that were they confronted with a shadowy, sinister, deadly, enemy who have already committed mass murder against American citizens and are preparing to do it again – or far worse – once they get the opportunity, the architects of the US Constitution would find the NSA survelliance program entirely reasonable!

The burden of proof in demonstrating that the program is unreasonable falls on the critics. For as Abraham Lincoln said during the terrible Civil War: “The constitution is not a suicide pact!” And as for the likes of Private Bradley, Julian Assange of Wikileaks, and this guy Snowden: I think they should be tried under the espionage act and hung for giving aide to the enemy during war time – preferably on Prime time television in order to discourage others that may be thinking about following their example!

The know it all whiners who think these leakers are heroes, defenders of our freedom, glibly assure us that Jihadists terror attacks can be checkmated without the kind of electronic surveillance the NSA is conducting………but suppose they are wrong?

Playthell G. Benjamin

Harlem New York

June 17, 2013

Bombs Exploding at Boston Marathon

Is Freedom and Domestic Tranquility Incompatible?

As we witnessed the carnage from the Boston Marathon in living color on CNN – a sporting event which has been held without incident, except for an unruly drunk here and there, for 117 years – an old friend of mine who has lived in New York City for over 70 years turned to me and asked: “Is this what the future of American society looks like? Will we ever return to the feelings of peace and security that I have known most of my life?”

I was tempted to say that his was the view of a black man that has always lived in the North, because Afro-Americans of his generation who grew up in the South lived under the constant threat of terrorism from our white neighbors, a fact I can personally attest to, but I understood what he meant.

What he was really asking is whether incidents of random carnage wrought by bombs or mass shootings, whether from foreign or domestic sources, is the “new normal” in America? In view of the frequency of these events it is a reasonable question. The massacre of innocents are now occurring so often that the public is becoming emotionally detached, desensitized. It is a means of retaining one’s sanity and maintaining one’s cool, because the alternative is to become paranoid and paralyzed with fear. Some people are becoming afraid to go out of the house.

A Massive Intelligence Failure

Reaping What We Sowed

It is easy for anyone with an active imagination to conjure up terrorist attacks that have not happened yet, but would be so easy to pull off you wonder whi it hasn’t happened. What is most frightening about this fact is that if it is possible for ordinary citizens to imagine these catastrophic scenarios…it is certain that the pros have thought of it. The only mystery is why they have not done it. When we think of such horrors as derailing high speed passenger trains, placing bombs in the New York subway system at rush hour, igniting a tanker truck filled with highly flammable gas in a tunnel at drive time, or downing passenger jets with shoulder held surface to air missiles – which were given to the Jihadists by the US Reagan Administration and trained in their use by the CIA, when they were the “heoric” Mujahidin fighting the Russians in Afghanistan – it is enough to make one paranoid and scared to go anywhere.

An Afghan/Arab Mujahidin firing a Stinger Missile

They can take down a plane and Reagan considered them Heroes!

The alternative to this is to go about your business with an optimism that is based more on faith that everything will be alright than a sober assessment of contemporary American realities. Of course statisticians will pull out their calculators and insure us that there is a small probability that any one of us will become a victim of terrorist attacks – but it is unconvincing to the people from the sleepy bedroom community of New Town Connecticut, who just months ago witnessed the mass slaughter of their children in their school, and then barley missed being blown to bits as the ran in the Boston marathon in remembrance of their slain children.

It is also unconvincing to the lady who survived a mass shooting only to end up in another mass slaughter by a mad gunman in a dark movie theater in Aurora Illinois. And the staticians are also unconvinving to those of us witnessing these tragedies on television. The frequency of mass murderers and the diversity of their targets – whether by home grown or foreign terrorist, and assorted mad men with military assault weapons looking for an easy path to newspaper headlines and the history books – is creating an increasing sense of insecurity and borderline panic in the American people. What Dr. DuBois said about the murderous violence directed against black Americans by whites in the early 20th century, has become true for random violence directed against all Americans: “Not all the time but anytime…not everywhere but anywhere.”

As Congressman Bennie Thompson, of the Homeland Security Committee is pointing out on MSNBC as I write, there are a 1000 organizations in the US identified in Homeland Security reports as having terrorist affiliations or objectives. This is a sobering fact that right-wing Republicans were quick to deny as a liberal attack against “conservatives.” It gives us some idea of the complexity of the job that those tasked with maintaining “domestic tranquility,” a fundamental role of government as defined in the US Constitution, are faced with.

With the recent assassinations of law enforcement officials – prosecutors in Texas and a Commissioner of prisons in Colorado – police agencies are confronted with an unprecedented threat to maintaining law and order. There can be no greater evidence of this than the fact that a federal prosecuter quit the investigation of the Aryan brotherhoodin Texas for reasons of “personal security.” The emergence of foreign and domestic terrorists willing to commit mass murder and assassinations of those whom we have elected to maintain the peace, requires the American government to adopt unprecedented measures to arrest their efforts at creating chaos in America.

This requires us to think the previously unthinkable, to ask questions that would have made one a Pariah in polite company not so long ago. Yet despite its odiousness to virtually every American, the question must be asked: In order to insure domestic tranquility must Americans be willing to abridge or even surrender some of our constitutional rights?

For instance, I believe that the only way to solve the growing carnage from gun violence is to repeal the Second Amendment, and make the penalty for illegal possession of a gun so Draconian that most people won’t even fantasize about it. And we would rely on the police for protection from criminals the way other advanced civilized nations do.

And should we become convinced that the American proclivity for slaughtering each other with guns – routinely producing far more casualties on the “peaceful” home front than on foreign battle fields – is a cultural problem, then we must not hesitate to ban certain kinds of violence in television, movies, and print media. We must do this even if it means abridging the First Amendment.

I say this as a left-wing libertarian, one who believes the role of government should be to maintain domestic tranquility, defend the nation against foreign enemies, and “give people stuff,” as Mitt Romney inelegantly put it – taxing the rich at whatever rate necissary to pay for it. I have long been suspect of the government having the power to control free expression whether in politics, entertainment or serious literature. And of course I consider academic discourse sacrosanct; yet in the absence of domestic tranquility the quality of life, such as it is, will be greatly degraded.

Thus the opportunity to pursue life, liberty and happiness – which the Founders thought was divinely ordained – will surely slip our grasp. Hence the fundamental question that confronts American civilization at this juncture in our history is: Can American society successfully fight the forces of terrorism – which will eventually destroy our peace of mind, imperil our personal security and diminish the quality of our lives – while simultaneously preserving our civil liberties as we have previously enjoyed them.

To be, or not to be, totally free: that is the question. In seeking an answer to this troublesome riddle, considering the fact that their are home grown lunatics running around with assault rifiles wreaking havoc everywhere, and legions of fanatical Islamic Jihadists who have dedicated their lives to killing as many Americans as possible by whatever means they can, inshallah, I would remind the reader to consider Abraham Lincoln’s response when he was called a tyrant for suspending the writ of Habeas Corpus during the Civil War: “The Constitution is not a suicide pact.”

A Day at the Races….

…..ain’t what it used to be!

*********************

Playthell G. Benjamin

Harlem, New york

March/15/03

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